This article in USA Today is so full of misinformation that it’s hard to know where to start. They work very hard to absolve Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and their policies for the rapid rise in inflation—but the actual evidence shows how responsible they really are.

Voters blamed Biden and Harris for rising costs. Was that fair? We asked economists.

[I]s the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris administration to blame?

Yes, the economists said, but only to a degree. Of the seven economists who spoke to USA TODAY, most cited the global pandemic, not Biden, as the primary cause of the nation’s inflation crisis.

[snip]

Biden and the Fed succeeded at pulling the economy out of the downturn. The job market swiftly stabilized.

But the stimulus effort also fed inflation, the economists said, which ultimately helped sink the Democrats at the polls.

‘I think that they thought the public would reward them more for a fast recovery, in terms of jobs, than they would punish them for inflation,’ said Ryan Bourne, an economist at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “I think that proved a huge miscalculation.”

Yet, most economists queried by USA TODAY listed the pandemic as the main reason for the historic price surge. Inflation, they said, would have happened no matter who was president.

‘There’s a long list of reasons for the high inflation,’ [Mark] Zandi said. ‘The Biden-Harris policies that are on the list are at the very bottom.’

[snip]

‘Biden/Harris don’t bear primary blame for the inflation,’ said Jeffrey Frankel, a Harvard University economist. ‘Primary blame, rather, goes to supply constraints as the economy came out of COVID and the acceleration of commodity prices that came with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.’

Foremost, these economists blame the pandemic for the inflation, but looking back at the data reveals that inflation stayed somewhere below 2% for the year of the pandemic (2020) before Biden was even in—it was 1.4% when Biden actually took office, and had remained low even with all the stimulus that was approved during Trump’s last year of his first term.

Next, they intentionally lie that Biden-Harris policies brought the country out of the downturn. The economy was soaring prior to Biden taking office. The recession was the shortest ever, ending two months after it started in April 2020. For the next eight months of 2020, jobs were coming back at over 1.6 million per month and yet the inflation rate was still 1.4%.

Next, they falsely try to deflect blame for the high inflation to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which occurred in February of 2022. This is so easy to disprove, it is laughable that anyone believes it. The price of oil, which affects everything, started soaring as soon as Biden got in because Biden campaigned on destroying the oil and natural gas industries.

The following is a detail from Yahoo Finance, showing what crude oil prices did from just before the 2020 election, through the time Putin invaded.

November 1, 2020, before the election, crude oil closed at $37.14. The greedy oil companies and Trump somehow kept oil prices low throughout his first four years.

Then, Biden was declared the winner, and traders took Biden’s campaign promises seriously and pushed the price up over 40% before he took office—January 17, 2021, the price was $52.17.

After one year of Biden, the price was up over 100%: on November 7, 2021, oil closed at  $80.21.

Before Putin invaded, it was up around 120%, reaching $86.82 on January 23, 2022.

It is pathetic that the media and economists refuse to blame Biden for the rapid rise in oil prices and overall inflation in the U.S. and around the world, when the facts don’t support that narrative at all.

Here are some of the actual Biden, Harris policies that led to high inflation:

Doling out massive amounts of taxpayer money to buy votes when the economy was already rapidly growing. There is no excuse for running a $2 trillion deficit this year, in a supposedly growing economy. They’re just masking the problems.

Flooding the United States with millions of illegals because Biden and Harris reversed Trump’s policies and ignored the law.

Issuing massive amounts of new regulations is clearly inflationary.

Blocking pipelines and drilling on federal lands while publicly seeking to destroy companies that use natural resources to produce reasonably priced energy causes inflation in the U.S. and throughout the world.

Forcing people and businesses to buy expensive health insurance policies instead of fostering freedom of choice. The media and other Democrats intentionally lie and claim that Obamacare has made health insurance more affordable; the truth is that prices have skyrocketed for 14 years because of the Affordable Care Act.

Throwing money at colleges for 60 years has certainly added to inflation. Then, we had a president who dictatorially paid off the loans using other people’s money and debt, which is also inflationary.

Forcing car companies to make expensive electric cars and trucks that people don’t want is obviously inflationary. It raises the prices of gas-powered cars, which covers the losses and all the capital investments.

The same economists who refuse to tell the truth about who and what caused high inflation were spreading misinformation when they asserted Trump’s policies would be worse for inflation and debt than Kamala’s high tax and spend policies.

People should give as much credibility to economists as they give to people who continually spread dire predictions about the climate ignoring how wrong they have been in the past—and ignore them entirely.

Image: Free image, Pixabay license.